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BBS Documentary Starting To Film
Jason Scott writes "Well, the BBS Documentary, after years of research and 4 months of pre-production, is set to film starting the first week in January. Once the filming starts, it's a solid year or more of interviews, travel, and hopefully some great footage of some very unique and interesting people. I'd like to thank Slashdot for the burst of letters and support, and I really appeciate the contacts they've helped me make with an amazing spectrum of folks to interview. The list is not complete, but I've so far gotten a great list of interviewees who helped make the Dial-Up BBS what it is in history (and today, I rush to add). Of course, the research is never done, and I encourage people to check out the BBS Software List and the timeline to help me flesh them out even more."
google is pretty damn useful sometimes..
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Sorry, I'm a moron. I meant software.bbsdocumentary.com and not hostnet.net. Just goes to show that 5 previews is STILL not enough.
I ran my BBS with RBBS-PC and was into it enough to have hacked up the source pretty good. I even shelled out for QuickBasic so that I could compile my modified versions.
By the late versions, RBBS-PC was so configurable and scriptable... add to that the available source code, and my BBS looked like no other, had a completely unique interface and did things like automatic virus scanning and conversion of uploads into multiple compression formats. Not like a lot of those WWIV systems which were all identical.
Come to think of it, RBBS-PC was really my first introduction to the fundamental concepts of open source. I don't even know if it was "open source" by modern standards, but having the source available allowed me to do my own thing and spend hours joyously hacking at little things I wanted to modify.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Hopefully they'll touch on the security of some of those systems too, they were a ball to hack. I remember Renegade in particular had a huge hole in it, where you could go into the d/l area, and pass it ..\..\Rengade\*.DAT and d/l the system's DAT files, then look through them to get the system password. With that, you could install a copy of Renegade on your system, put in those DAT files, use the system pw to login locally, and then get the passwords of every user on the system, including the sysop. And then log back into the BBS as sysop and have some fun.... ;)
Man those were good days. Oh, and as far as add-on software, they have to touch on Doorway, an ANSI emulator for DOS command prompt sessions. I used that to administer my board when I was away. I ran the Sanitarium up here in Michigan's 810, and had the most activity around in 95-96
I've the privilege of knowing Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, the two who INVENTED the BBS (and coined the term) right here in Chicago. Ward is an on-site technical support rep that is working in my office a bit now. We had lunch a few days ago.
/. that Google had posted the USENET archives I checked for Ward's name. I told him that comes up with 700 messages, mostly mentioning his MODEM protocol as "the Ward Christensen protocol." Yeah, he invented file transfers by modem, too. Google returns over 54,000 web page matches for Ward's name. Ward laughs about how many hits you can get when his name is mis-spelled.
When it was mentioned here on
In 1978, Chicago had a severe blizzard and Ward and Randy wanted to share programs. Ward wrote the MODEM protocol to send the files back and forth.
During that snowstorm in January 1978, they invented CBBS to emulate the cork bulletin board at the meetings of the Chicago Computer Hobbyists Exchange (CACHE) user group that computer hobbyists used to post messages about wanted computer parts and such. They made use of a pair of direct connect 300 baud modems donated by Dennis Hayes. Randy built the S100 system and Ward wrote the program which they called CBBS. There was no operating system in those days, so the program talked directly to the hardware. It took them a month to have it done by the next CACHE meeting.
Ward is a pioneer that we all owe:
- He invented the world's first BBS program, CBBS.
- He wrote the world's first modem file transfer program, (X)MODEM.
-one the pioneers of FREE OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE. The company he works for would not let him sell programs he wrote so he gave them away. If you had an early CP/M system like I did, you knew that there were dozens and dozens of free useful utilities available on BBSs that were written by one W. Christensen.
BTW, they copyrighted the term "CBBS," not "BBS." Oh, well.
I'm sure the documentary team will be looking up Ward. I'll let him know about this and maybe he'll post.
P.S. Randy's Illinois license plate is CBBS. Ward's is XMODEM.
Trivia question: What does the C stand for? It's not what you think.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s!
It depends on the software he was using. By about 1990 or so, there were several BBS apps that used Desqview to run multiple instances of the BBS on one box, and others that supported DigiBoards with 16 COM ports. TBBS, which was written in assembler to be amazingly frugal with system resources, supported "intelligent" DigiBoards and could accomodate up to 64 lines on one Intel box. I know because we had a 48 lines hooked up to a 386SX TBBS host -- which we later upgraded to a 64-line 486.
I ran several BBS' under CP/M on Epson QX-10's and later on QX-16's -- including "Pulsar" in the LA area.. Do you remember the "Bye" or "mbye" programs that were required to pickup the phone when it rang? There's a concept!
I even for a while ran the Epson technical support BBS in Torrance -- and even got paid! Later I switched over to using a PC and ran WWIV -- care of Wayne Bell -- He went to my church at the time.. Lot's of good memories.. I remember when Wayne Bell was one of the first systems that had "pseudo" network mail, where you sent mail to 1@1 (Wayne Bell), and it would travel over the various modems between different cities, etc.. Very slick -- pre Internet...